Category Archives: Book Reviews

“Every year, when I was a kid, my Dad put on a play for my birthday. He did it to help me cope with my annual heart check-up, and also the fear and uncertainty that I felt pretty much every day. He called them the Days of Wonder, because he said wonder beat everything.” The…Read the full article…

I had a sneaky suspicion, before even turning the first page of Keith Stuart’s debut novel, that I would really enjoy it. Having been marketed as “the most uplifting novel of the year” and received a glowing endorsement from Graeme Simsion, writer of The Rosie Project - one of my favourite reads in recent years - I was…Read the full article…

Issue 13 of Guru Magazine is out today, and in it you’ll find my latest book review – and a very timely one, at that. As the nation remembers the Olympic Games one year on, I review British author Chris Cleave’s third novel, GOLD - the fictional tale of two Olympic cyclists, Zoe Castle and Kate Meadows, and…Read the full article…

It’s really quite fitting that Carrie Dunn’s new book, an exploration of the business of British professional wrestling, is called Spandex. Much more than just a catchy title, the name is actually emblematic of mainstream perception of wrestling as a whole. No matter how much the industry has evolved over the past three decades into the…Read the full article…

Few professional wrestlers’ careers have been as highly-documented as that of Bret Hart. Not only did the seven-time World heavyweight champion bare all in his highly-acclaimed autobiography My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling back in 2007, but the WWE Hall of Famer’s career has also been celebrated in a number of DVD boxsets over the…Read the full article…

A MAN FAMOUS for his way with words, Greg Lambert certainly does not shy away from revealing the influence that he feels that the Frontier Wrestling Alliance had on the wrestling scene in Great Britain in his new book: “By inspiring so many, the FWA actually accelerated its own decline … [the] rapid increase in new British wrestling…Read the full article…

It’s the ABC show that everyone is currently talking about – but have you read the book? Guru Magazine‘s Ben Veal has, and he wasn’t exactly bowled over… High praise has certainly been heaped upon Christos Tsiolaks’ The Slap: The Times dubbed it the “first great Australian novel,” while John Boyne has even gone so…Read the full article…

One of my favourite books of the last few years is Dave Gorman’s America Unchained. If you haven’t read it, I can’t recommend it highly enough – it’s terrific. The premise is simple; Dave, disheartened at the demise of ‘mom and pop’ stores across America, attempts to drive from coast to coast without using any chain…Read the full article…